Frequent, rapid testing could turn national COVID-19 tide within weeks

9 min readNov 21, 2020

The foggy origins, malleable policies, and naked ambitionof the certified phony who would be the leader of the free world.

The foggy origins, malleable policies, and naked ambition of the certified phony who would be the leader of the free world.

The tattered corpses of the Presidential Debates 2020 — debates scarcely held; never designed as debates, anyway, but rigged, staged dueling press conferences; “moderated” by biased referees — robbed America of what would have been the most pressing, and most revealing, debate of all: Biden vs. Biden. More than to protect against the virus, more than Uncle Joe being insulated from gaffes, his campaign’s hermit strategy was designed to avoid exposure. Not over-exposure (as with Hillary, four years ago); not even angrily to bark loyal irrelevancies about Hunter Biden to prevent further investigation. Rather, to avoid facing the record and dealing with earlier versions of himself and the fatal aspects of his life

‘Try, try, try again’ was Biden’s virtual mantra, his campaign theme.

Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., was touted as a Kennedyesque President-in-waiting by a Delaware newspaper two years before he even first ran for the United States Senate. His first of three presidential campaigns was 32 years ago. Until the South Carolina primary and the benediction — or absolution — of Representative (“Cardinal”) James Clyburn this year, Biden failed to achieve more than “scratch” of primary votes in all those contests. In the 1988 Democrat Convention, he received only .05% of votes. In 2008, his share of Democrat votes in all primaries combined was .22%. This year, the endorsement of that local Congressman, and the rapid disappearance of rival candidates, stoked Biden’s “momentum.”

‘Try, try, try again’ was Biden’s virtual mantra, his campaign theme.

Given the candidate’s lack of enthusiasm and scarce evidence of resilience in 2020, not to mention widespread doubts about his acuity, one might wonder whether his case running for president this time around was an autonomic response or some sort of political rigor mortis. There is no Biden constituency, and…

New research shows that broad, national dissemination of frequent, rapid COVID-19 tests could turn the tide on the pandemic within weeks, without shutting down schools and businesses. For curbing infection, test turnaround time is more important than test sensitivity.

IMAGE CAPTION: A CU Boulder student provides a saliva sample for a rapid COVID-19 test. CU is among several institutions developing new tests which can provide faster-turnaround results.

Testing half the population weekly with inexpensive, rapid-turnaround COVID-19 tests would drive the virus toward elimination within weeks — even if those tests are significantly less sensitive than gold-standard clinical tests, according to a new study published today by CU Boulder and Harvard University researchers.

Such a strategy could lead to “personalized stay-at-home orders” without shutting down restaurants, bars, retail stores and schools, the authors said.

“Our big picture finding is that, when it comes to public health, it’s better to have a less sensitive test with results today than a more sensitive one with results tomorrow,” said lead author Daniel Larremore, an assistant professor of computer science at CU Boulder. “Rather than telling everyone to stay home so you can be sure that one person who is sick doesn’t spread it, we could give only the contagious people stay-at-home orders so everyone else can go about their lives.”

For the study, published in the journal Science Advances, Larremore teamed up with collaborators at CU’s BioFrontiers Institute and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health to explore whether test sensitivity, frequency, or turnaround time is most important to curb the spread of COVID-19.

It’s time to shift the mentality around testing from thinking of a COVID test as something you get when you think you are sick to thinking of it as a vital tool to break transmission chains and keep the economy open.”

–Dan Larremore

The researchers scoured available literature on how viral load climbs and falls inside the body during an infection, when people tend to experience symptoms, and when they become contagious.

They then used mathematical modeling to forecast the impact of screening with different kinds of tests on three hypothetical…

Frequent, rapid testing could turn national COVID-19 tide within weeks

Written by Masuddit